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Lines in the Sand: Religious Diversity or Religious Division The Legal Pluralism Paradox in Lebanon
No full textThis thesis critically examines the intersections of categorical thinking, the civic myth, kinship, and decolonial theories within the framework of legal pluralism in Lebanon. It integrates the Escobar’s concept of the pluriverse to challenge conventional narratives of pluralism and expand our understanding of legal systems beyond state-centric models. Focusing on Lebanon's pluralistic legal landscape, the study investigates how kinship and sectarianism shape personal status laws, institutional governance, and social dynamics. By examining Lebanon’s reliance on sectarian-based legal frameworks, the research highlights how legal pluralism reinforces categorical thinking and entrenches sectarian divisions. Kinship operates as both an idiomatic and institutional structure, supporting the civic myth of harmonious pluralism while masking the perpetuation of political hierarchies and social inequities. Personal status laws emerge as critical sites where religious identity and legal authority intersect, reducing individuals to fixed categories thereby undermining national cohesion. Through ethnographic accounts of minority Muslim, Druze and Christian Maronite communities, this study reveals how kinship and relational power mediate the interaction of non-state actors with state institutions. It critiques the limitations of liberal legalism, arguing that legal pluralism, as configured in Lebanon, prioritises sectarian affiliation over individual agency, exacerbating structural inequities. The thesis advances a multidimensional framework that situates legal pluralism within broader socio-political contexts, exploring how civil society organisations and non-state actors are crucial to address governance voids. It argues for normative legal pluralism as a pathway toward fostering inclusivity, integration, and equitable legal frameworks. Ultimately, this research offers a critical reassessment of pluralism as a tool for understanding legal systems, highlighting its potential for reshaping governance and promoting justice in fragmented societies like Lebanon
The Devil’s in Decline: Western Anti-Gender Politics and the Evolution of Queerphobia in Lebanon
No full textThis article explores a wave of queerphobia that washed over Lebanon in the summer of 2023, some features of which were notably distinct from those of previous moral panics around gender and sexuality in the country. Traditionally moral panics around gender and sexuality in Lebanon have framed queer people as agents of Western imperialism. While this framing continues to fuel these panics, I argue that more recently Lebanese political actors have also begun capitalizing on the so-called Western culture wars to fashion a politically productive image of the West as not only a threat but a harbinger of things to come. Within this framing, the West emerges as having been weakened by the spread of “gender ideology,” in turn presented as an out-of-control contagion that a morally superior but threatened Lebanon must protect itself against. This invites an approach to the increase in and evolution of queerphobia in Lebanon not so much as a reaction to and backlash against LGBTQI+ rights gains in the West but as a convergence and entanglement with a growing Western anti-gender movement. I argue that the Lebanese state and political actors have not merely been passively reacting to the anti-gender movement in the West but actively drawing on it for their own political gain in ways that encourage us to rethink governance and state power in the Global South as more than just reactive to a power imbalance vis-à-vis the West
Voluntary labour, nation-building and constructing modernity: self-help and volunteerism in Tanzania in the 1960s
No full textWith 2026 being the International Year of Volunteers for Sustainable Development, this article examines the experience of volunteerism, and specifically Self-Help voluntary labour in Tanzania in the early colonial period, to explore the ways in which volunteerism was embedded in the construction of the post-colonial state and a site of alternative understandings of what that new state should look. It draws attention to the long history of global South volunteering, one that pre-dates the rise of neoliberal state roll-back and increased reliance on private actors (including volunteers) for public provisioning. And it seeks to understand the ways in which Tanzanian volunteerism (volunteerism by Tanzanians, in Tanzania) was a critical part of the (contested) imaginaries of what a new nation might look like after the collapse of colonial occupation. In doing so it challenges analysis and critiques of volunteering which present global-North mobilities as the normative experience. The analysis presented in the article explores volunteerism as a form of labour rather than primarily an experience and expression of civic engagement; and through that explores the relationship between volunteerism and the state in public provisioning and state construction
Humanitarian Concerns and Acceptance of Syrian Refugees in Turkey
No full textDo humanitarian concerns increase support for hosting refugees? Evidence from Western democracies suggests they do, but do they matter elsewhere? We theorize that humanitarian motivations—concern for torture victims—make host societies more willing to welcome refugees regardless of background. Based on a conjoint experiment in Turkey (N = 2,362), Syrian refugee profiles indicating torture receive higher support than otherwise-similar profiles without torture. This effect is modest compared to other drivers and Western findings, yet increases support uniformly across torture victims regardless of ethnicity, religion, education, or civil war involvement. The effect extends across neighborhood residence, work permits, and citizenship, resonating broadly across respondents. Gender is the sole significant moderator, with information about torture having a stronger effect on female respondents. These findings demonstrate that humanitarian concerns persist even in contexts of mass displacement and economic strain, though their influence remains limited relative to ethnic and religious considerations
Adaptive radiation of pelagiarian fishes at the K/Pg boundary led to rapid diversification of mandible morphology
Full text linkMandibles represent a key evolutionary innovation that has enabled jawed vertebrates to adapt and diversify in response to a range of food sources, and changes in mandible shape are often linked with adaptive radiations into new ecological niches. Using a phylogenetic comparative approach, we explore the phenotypic disparity and mechanical properties of the lower jaw in Pelagiaria, a morphologically diverse but relatively small clade of open-ocean fishes which arose near the Cretaceous/Paleogene (K/Pg) mass extinction event. Using three-dimensional (3D) geometric morphometrics, we find that the high phenotypic disparity of the pelagiarian mandible was established very early in their evolutionary history, and high levels of disparity have been maintained over tens of millions of years; this is consistent with the hypothesis that Pelagiaria represents an ancient adaptive radiation. We test the correlation of mandible shape with potential drivers of shape evolution and find that mandible shape is correlated with habitat depth and tooth type but not with body elongation or diet. Moreover, mandible shape is significantly correlated with mechanical advantage (MA), with closing MA being most strongly correlated. Pelagiarian jaw shapes fall broadly into six morphotypes, of which two show significantly higher closing MA than other groups, despite differing substantially in shape. Our results demonstrate both the mechanical and morphological diversity of the pelagiarian mandible and support the hypothesis that Pelagiaria underwent rapid morphological diversification early in their evolution, likely due to adaptive radiation
COVID-19 and the Chinese community in London: Discourse circulation, semantic shifts, and transnational communication in a public health crisis
No full textDrawing on findings from ten interviews conducted in 2021, this study examines how members of the British Chinese community in London accessed and interpreted COVID-19 pandemic information, the barriers they encountered in institutional health communication, and the shifting meanings of health artefacts. The findings reveal that transnational information flows created both protective advantages and confusion, that communicative inequalities were frequent during the pandemic, and that the semiotic meanings of key health artefacts became politicised and racialised. The analysis makes use of what we propose as an integrative discourse analysis, which examines data using concepts from several theoretical frameworks
Global Screen Worlds: Conversations Across Cinema Cultures
No full textGlobal Screen Worlds brings together scholars from around the world to collaborate on comparative studies of specific African and Asian cinemas and audiovisual narrative media.This open access collection advances the concept of “screen worlds” rather than “world cinema” to acknowledge and reckon with the impact of new technologies on cinema and everyday life, and the contributors adopt a decolonial feminist approach that insists on localized, intersectional analyses that take race, gender, and class into account in their critique of historical and contemporary abuses of power. Many chapters are set against major world-historical events—such as the Cold War and the Bandung era—and grapple with the relationships among films, filmmaking practices, and social, historical, and cultural experiences.In the chapters, contributors variously explore, for example, filmmaking relationships between countries as diverse as the UAE and India, China and South Africa; K-pop fandom among audiences in Madagascar and North-east India, and Bollywood fandom in southern Nigeria; the use of parallel filmmaking genres and themes in Lagos and Mumbai, Tokyo and Lahore; and comparative analysis of the films of well-known African and Asian filmmakers such as Yasujiro Ozu and Alain Gomis, Satyajit Ray and Souleymane Cissé, and Wong Kar-wai and Mahamat Saleh Haroun
Theodosia Sophroniades: Insider as Outsider in Late Ottoman Istanbul
Full text linkThe dissertation focuses on Theodosia Sophroniades, a long-neglected minority voice that resists essentialist narratives and fixed categories in Ottoman intellectual history. Chapter One emphasises her body of work and pioneering roles in the multilingual Ottoman milieu of the late nineteenth century, in stark contrast to her silencing in women’s historiography. It foregrounds her development of linguistic and cultural mediation within Ma‘rifet, in which she served as publisher, director, and editor-in-chief. Chapter Two examines her positioning as an ‘insider’, arguing that her articles in the Ottoman francophone press promoted Hamidian diplomacy as a means of maintaining her intellectual visibility on regime-backed platforms. French enabled her to distance herself from her own ethno-religious identity, while revealing a notable absence of features characteristic of Greek nationalist values and of the (non-)role of Orthodox Christianity. Chapter Three analyses her position as an ‘outsider’ within late Ottoman women’s writing, highlighting how she created a space for the dismantling of notions of mother, wife, and chaste woman. Her Western-centric feminist views engaged with Oriental exoticism through the aesthetics of Chinoiserie. Chapter Four applies the concept of ‘minor literature’ to her short story at the intersection of gender, language, and minority subjectivity. The research aims to contribute to the academic literature on the multidimensional gender debate of Ottoman women’s collective history
Made in China - episode 2: 'Home, before Home'
No full textJieyu Liu is feature interviewed by BBC producer Eva Brookes about cultural and institutional context behind transnational adoption in China
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